According to a study of Fortune 500 companies conducted by CareerBuilder, 39% of the US population uses tablet devices. A survey conducted by Glassdoor.com found that 43 percent of job candidates’ research their prospective employer and read the job description on their mobile device just 15 minutes prior to their interviews. Almost 90 percent of job seekers say they plan on using their mobile device for some job searching in the next year, according to Glassdoor. That's up from 82 percent last year. Unfortunately, only 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a mobile-optimized career site.
The food-services corporation Sodexo, the 20th-largest employer in the U.S., got a head start in that process in early 2012, when it developed both a mobile-optimized career site and a smartphone app to pull together all the information about the company’s recruiting efforts into one easy-for-Millennials-to-access place. Prospective employees could visit the mobile app to search and apply for jobs, join a talent community, receive job alerts, and get an insider’s view about what it’s like to work for Sodexo.
The results according to Arie Ball, VP Talent Acquisition at Sodexo, 17 percent of job traffic from potential new hires now comes from the mobile app versus just 2 percent of mobile traffic in early 2012. In the first year, mobile app downloads totaled 15,000, leading to over 2,000 new job candidates and 141 actual new hires, all while saving the company $300,000 in job board postings.
The graphic below provides a look at some of the survey's other key findings.
